We Must Defend Free Thought
quillette.com
quillette.com
But I find myself feeling that a portion of the left has retained the banner issues of the left, while adopting a shockingly tribal worldview and conservative tactics of the right.
It feels like when I was younger, and you'd say something critical about some aspect of the US, and the retort was, “if you hate our country so much, why don’t you just leave.” Critique was rounded to anti-American sentiment and you thus became a valid target of unlimited scorn.
I see the same thing on the left, where if you don’t agree to a reductive expression of certain wedge issues, people are rounded to nazi, misogynist, X-phobic, etc. and then are irredeemably subject to unlimited scorn.
I expect this kind of stuff from the right, but it’s painful to see it from the left.
The left supports special rights based on membership of a group such as race, gender, gender expression, sexuality, etc...
It seems to me the left is behaving exactly as expected.
This is the nature of power, and an example of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Once a particular version of an ideology becomes the preferred political weapon of the majority, displacing the previous one, it can be considered to have become the Moral Majority.
When this happens, the rational people (those who cared about the ideology as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, to summarize the Iron Law) begin to look for greener pastures. The people that are attracted to the ideology simply because it has political capital begin to pervert it, twisting it further and further from the truth the ideology was originally designed to address. These people care little for logical consistency, and tend to create contradictions until another ideology (pushed to prominence because it was forced to be liberal to accept the good people seeking refuge from the first one's oppressiveness, and relatively parasite-free because of its lack of political status) comes along. And at that point they jump ship, the new one becomes the Moral Majority, and the cycle starts again.
Liberals have already left Leftism, because Rightism is a better fit for liberal thought at the moment. Authoritarians are the only ones left on the Left, simply because they like the power of what the idea still represents (the general population has a lot of lag time and takes a while to catch up; it's faster if they can outright defy the authoritarians and not need to worry about finding another job or house if they lose theirs for political reasons- the 50s through the late 70s gave that power to a lot of people which is why so much change was able to happen; whereas today due to economic slowdown this process is a lot slower).
This tension between liberals and non-liberals is the real Culture War. And so it rages.
The problem with liberals is they mistake the means for the end. Because their lives are insulated from consequence, they prefer the “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”. They have a fairytale understanding of the world, where Nazism can be stopped with debate instead of carpet bombings.
What matters is that the hungry are fed, the sick are treated, and the vulnerable protected, and that everyone can live free of the threat of violence or deprivation. Decorum and the delicate feelings of bigots do not matter.
I feel the same way as OP. I have been a leftist all my life. Not so much now. You are just a prime example why.
You don't seem to understand the function of the things you dismiss. The First Amendment, Democracy, and trust in the Marketplace of Ideas exist to make sure that society's mind can be changed as easily as is practically possible. It's not a guarantee that society will get it right, it's an escape hatch for when society gets it wrong.
And when we look at everywhere else, where those escape valves don't exist, you get nothing but mass murder as a direct result of unquestionable, unassailable government/popular policy. Think of how much more difficult it would be to change society's mind about separate-but-equal or nonstandard sexual orientations if you weren't able to talk about or vote on them in the first place; you'd never have the kind of cultural revolution you had in America in the 1950s-70s without the ability to first persuade people it should happen.
>Decorum and the delicate feelings of bigots do not matter.
Despite what you may want to believe, you are not the one who decides who is and is not a bigot. Expose your life to the logical consequence of that; I don't think you're going to like what that statement fully implies.
Slavery was ended by war. Labor rights were achieved by fatal street battles. The civil rights movement was legitimized by a growing threat of a domestic insurrection. Marriage equality was established by an unelected Supreme Court. Basically every time significant positive change has happened in this country has been the result of extrademocratic leverage being found and exercised, not going hat in hand to ask an uncaring majority for what you are due as a human being.
Finally, as a moral being with obligations to others I absolutely get to decide who is a bigot, just as you do.
That’s the farce, that political change happens through some cosplay conception of an Athenian forum instead of the accumulation and exercise of power. It’s a fact that fascists know instinctively and the left has been waking up to. For liberals, who are enthralled by process and satisfied with the status quo, the threat of change is more serious than the reality of injustice.